In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of digital media available online. Services, such as Apple's iTunes® for example, enable users to legally purchase and download music. Other services, such as Yahoo!® Music Unlimited and RealNetwork's Rhapsody®, provide access to millions of songs for a monthly subscription fee. YouTube® provides users access to video media. As a result, media items have become much more accessible to consumers worldwide. Due to the large amount of the accessible digital media, recommendation technologies are emerging as an important enabler to assist users in identifying and navigating large databases of available media. Recommendations are useful to help users identify and select media items of interest for usage and/or play.
Recommendations may be programmatically-generated by a company based on the user's predefined preferences and/or profiles. Recommendations also may be provided by other users. Particularly, the users may be peers on a social network. The social network provides for the exchange of media item recommendations among the users. As such, the user on the social network may be both a recommender user of media items to other users and a recipient user of media item recommendations from other users. In this manner, the user may receive a media item recommendation from another user and transmit a media item recommendation to other users.
Typically, the users on the social network have some type of relationship. For example, the users may be friends, acquaintances, or members of a defined group or community. Because of these relationships, the users may have similar traits, profiles, likes and dislikes, and/or media item preferences. Therefore, the social networks provide an opportunity to develop and strengthen the interaction between the users not only with respect to the media items, but also with respect to the users personally. The development and strengthening of the user interaction promotes the continued use of the social network for media item recommendations and the acquisition and playing of the media items recommended.
The ability of the user on the social network to be both the recommender of media items and recipient of media item recommendations provides an opportunity to further develop and strengthen user interaction on the social network. This could be better accomplished if the media item recommendation could be propagated among the users on the social network. Propagation of media item recommendations means that, instead of the recipient user just receiving the media item recommendation, the recipient, and each subsequent recipient, would be able to further transmit, or retransmit, the media item recommendation. In this way, the media item recommendation would be progressively transmitted among the users on the social network thus providing ancestry-like information to new recipients.
Additionally, propagating the media item recommendation would allow additional information to be included in the media item recommendation with the transmission, and with subsequent retransmissions of the media item recommendation. The additional information may be that of the recommender and/or the recipient, and may provide personal information of the recommender, recipient and/or information about the media item or the artist. As a result, incorporating additional information into the media item recommendation would increase the enjoyment, educational effect, and entertainment value of the media item recommendation itself.
Therefore, because of the above, being able to propagate the media item recommendation would result in continued communication between the users, thereby promoting and enhancing the personal interaction among the users and the interest in the media item being recommended.
However, current media item recommendation applications do not provide for the propagation of media item recommendations. The current media item recommendation applications allow the recommender to send a media item recommendation to the recipient. While the recipient user may send his or her own recommendation of the media item, the current media item applications do not allow for the retransmission or progressive transmission of the media item recommendation including presence information of the recommender and/or the recipient.
Accordingly, a need exists for a media item recommendation system and method that provides and propagates a media item recommendation message that includes presence information of a recommender and/or the recipient.